Mental Health and being a carer.
Up and down the country (I’m keeping this UK based but it happens all over the world.) there are people who have had to give up their jobs and careers to care for a loved one with severe mental health problems. Now a lot is written about mental health but quite often the army of family members who look after sufferers are overlooked.
When someone becomes a carer the first thing they learn is they are on-call 24/7, people who suffer from mental health don’t keep office hours when it comes to needing help.
Second thing is you’re thrown in the deep end with no training and no booklet to tell you what to do. You learn on the ‘job’, you learn from mistakes and there will be mistakes. You will have to deal with an overdose at least once. You will have to sit and clean the blood from cuts when your loved one self-harms and they’re sat sobbing and apologising as you wrap a bandage around their wounds.
Medicines are not a cure for mental health, no matter how much they seem to be getting better there is always a crash in mood just around the corner. Learning this is vital for your own sanity. And talking of the carer’s sanity they will end up talking to their doctor and leaving with a prescription for themselves for anti-depressants. The isolation, stress and pressure for caring for a loved one, who at times they don’t recognise as the person they love will wear them down.
Being a carer is far more than giving out tablets, you have to learn about the illness, not just to be able to spot the triggers of a mood swing but also to deal with doctors and often the social security people. (I’d need a whole other post to talk about the social people.) You will know more about your loved ones illness than anybody, you become their social worker as there isn’t any help out there unless you’re really lucky to get a CPN. Mental health is so underfunded the specialist doctor does little more than review tablets every three or four months. Local GP doctors often have no understanding of mental health and always defer to the specialist. Extra help is often only available as a last resort, when things reach the level of crisis. When despite everything the carer has learnt they have to hit the panic button and hope the specialist care is there to help.
I could go on but don’t want to get people all depressed, despite all the problems carers have it’s worth it for the good days. A last bit of advice is learn how to laugh about mental illness, jokes about things can be what is needed to lighten a situation, laughter can be the best medicine.
If you believe that prescription medicine makes people worse and you believe that food is medicine then checkout the new book called Medical Medium by Anthony William, it might help you and your family.
While side effects on presciption medicines can be bad the benifits of mood stablisers and other drugs can't be dismissed. Getting a balance of drugs, a healthy diet (what you eat is very imprtant.) and excersie (not always possible depending on mood and excersie dosn't just mean going to the gym either, walking the dog counts.) can all help.
Stress and worry are the main things I need to protect my loved one from and ensuring if we have a busy few days she gets enough rest.
@alienbutt upvoted 100%
totally agree on that - I've spoken to a woman from curacao in a networking event I attended to last month and she is a caregiver for dementia patient. She said - giving them medicine is like letting them retrogress faster and sometimes their liver and kidney could not process the medicine they take either.
She also mentioned that - I admire her for her being so dedicated in what she does - she said she takes care of several dementia patient and she doesn't agree with the current system there is - some of them are being fed porridge but she said it's better not to "short cut" everything for them. If they could chew - the better. Never let them be alone in the room, if she could take them for a walk she does. She even reads health magazines and blog articles that could perhaps point out the cause of this and how it could be slowed down because it just is a progressive disease. Mental health is not only about dementia I understand but if caring for dementia patient could be this tough - how much more with the others? Real carers do awesome jobs sadly - not very recognized.
Thank you for the upvote.
There is such a lack of funding for mental health, it just seems the system throws drugs at sufferers and carers are left to work it out on their own.